How to Appear in Google's Answer Boxes - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

Featured snippets are the name of the rankings game. Often eclipsing organic results at the top of the SERPs, "ranking zero" or capturing an answer box in Google can mean increased clicks and traffic to your site. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains the three types of featured snippets and how you can best position yourself to grab those coveted spots in the SERPs.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're going to chat about answer boxes, those featured snippets that Google puts in ranking position zero, oftentimes above the rest of the organic results, usually below some of the top ads, and sometimes they can draw a ton of the clicks away from the rest of the 10 results that would normally appear in Google's organic ranking.

Now, thanks to our friends up at STAT in Vancouver — Rob Bucci specifically, who did a great presentation at MozCon, he delivered some really interesting research — and so we know a little bit more about the world of featured snippets. Specifically, that there are three kinds of featured snippets or answer boxes, if you prefer, that appear in Google's results on both mobile and desktop. Now, Rob used desktop-based, but in my research I checked through all the examples that I could find, and the same featured snippets that we saw in desktop were replicated on mobile. So I think this is a pretty one-to-one ratio that's going on here.

The three were paragraphs, lists, and tables. I'll show you examples of all of those. But globally, we're talking about 15% of all queries in STAT's database that came up with one of these answer boxes.

Paragraphs

So I did a search here for "Istanbul history." You can see that Wikipedia is not just ranking number one, they're also ranking number zero. So they have this nice featured snippet. It's got a photo or an image that'll appear on the right-hand side on desktop or on top of the text in mobile, and then the snippet, which essentially tries to give you a brief answer, a quick answer to the question. Now, of course, this query is pretty broad, I probably want to know a lot more about Istanbul's history than the fact that it was a human settlement for 3,000 years. But if you want just that quick answer, you can get those.

There are paragraph answers for all sorts of things. These are about 63% of all the answer boxes are in paragraph format.

Lists

Lists look like this. So I search for "strengthen lower back," I get, again, that image and then I get — this is from wikiHow, so quality, questionable — but back strengthening exercises. They say, number one, do pelvic tilting. Number two, do hip bridges. Number three, do floor swimming. Number four, do the bird dog exercise. That sounds exciting and painful. This is from an article called "How to Strengthen Lower Back," and it's on wikiHow's URL there. These lists, that are usually in numeric or they can be in bullet point format, so either one can appear, they're about 19% of answers.

Tables

And then finally, we have ones like this. I searched for "WordPress hosting comparison." These tables show up in a lot of places where you see a comparison or a chart-type of view. In this case, there actually was a visual of an actual graph, and then performance of the best WordPress hosting companies, the name, the account type, the cost per month. This is from wpsitecare.com. Again, this was ranking, I believe, number two or number three and also ranking number zero. So this is sort of great. I can't remember who was ranking number one, but they're ranking ahead of the number one spot, as well, by being in this position zero.

In addition to knowing this about featured snippets, that, hey, it's a fairly substantive quantity of things, it can also jump you above the rest of the results, and there are these three different formats, we had a bunch of questions and we keep getting them on, "How do I get in there?" I actually have some great answers for you. So not only has Rob and his team been doing some research, but we've done some research and some testing work here at Moz, and Dr. Pete has done a bunch. So I do have some suggestions, some recommendations for you if you're going to try and get into these featured snippets.

Best practices to appear in the answer box/featured snippet

1. Identify queries in KW research that, implicitly or explicitly, ask a question.

You actually need to do your keyword research and identify those queries that implicitly or explicitly are asking a question. The question needs to be slightly broader than what Google can deliver directly out of Knowledge Graph.

So for example, if you were to ask, "How old is Istanbul," they might say "3,000 years old." They might not even give any citation at all to Wikipedia or any other website. If I were to ask, "How old is Rand Fishkin," they might put in 37, and they might give absolutely no citation, no link at all, no credit to any page of mine on the web. Again, very frustrating.

So these are essentially queries that we're looking for in our keyword research that are slightly broader than a single line or single piece of knowledge, but they do demand a question that it's being answered. You can find those in your keyword research pretty easily. If you go into Keyword Explorer, for example, and you use the suggestions filter for our questions, virtually all of those are. But many things, like Istanbul history, it's an implicit question, not an explicit one. So you can get featured snippets for those as well.

2. Seek out queries that already use the answer box. If the competition's doing a poor job, these are often easy to grab.

You want to seek out queries that already use the answer box. So again, if you're using a tool like Keyword Explorer or something — I believe STAT does this as well — where they will identify the types of results that are in the query. You're looking for these answer box- or featured snippets-types of results. If they are in there and someone else already owns it, that means you can usually leapfrog them by providing a better-formatted, more accurate, more complete, or higher-ranking answer.

So if you're ranking number three or number four and the number two or number one result is producing that answer box and you reformat your content (and I'll talk about how we can do that in a sec), you reformat your content to meet one of these items, the correct one, whichever one is being triggered, you can leapfrog them. You can take that position zero away from your competition and earn it for yourself. It's especially easy when they're doing a poor job. If they've got a weak result in there, and there are a lot of these that are very weak today, you can often take them away.

3. Ranking #1 can help, but isn't required! Google will pull from any first page result.

Ranking number one is helpful, but it is not required. Google will pull from any first-page result. In fact, you can test this for yourself. Very frequently, if you do a query that pulls up an answer box and then you take the query string and you add "&num=100", or you change your settings in Google Search such that Google shows 50 or 100 results, they are often going to pull from a lower-down result, sometimes in the bottom 30 or 40 results rather than the top 10. So Google is essentially triggering this answer result from anything that appears on page one of the query, which is awesome for all of us because it means that we could be ranking number 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and still get the answer box if we do other things correctly, like...

4. Format and language are essential! Match the paragraph, or table, and use the logical answer to the query terms in your title/caption/label/section header.

Format and language. These are essential. The language means the language used. We need to use the terms and phrases a little more literally than we would with a lot of other types of keyword targeting, because Google really, really seems to like, if I search for "strengthen lower back," they are showing me an article called "strengthen lower back," not "back strengthening for newbies" or that kind of thing. They are much more literal in most of these than we've seen them be, thanks to technologies like RankBrain and Hummingbird, with other kinds of queries.

We also need to make sure that we're matching the paragraph, the list, or the table format and that we're using a logical answer to those query terms. That answer can be in the title of your web page, but it can also be in the caption of an image, the label of a section, or a section header. In this case, for example, part three of this article was back strengthening exercises. That's where they're pulling from. In this case, they have "City of Istanbul" and then they have history and that's the section. In this case, it's the performance chart that's shown right at the top of the web page. But they will pull from inside a document. So as long as you're structured in one section or in the document as a whole correctly, you can get in there.

You want to beaccurate. Google actually does tend to favor more accurate results.I know you might say, "How do I know I'm being accurate? Some of this information is very subjective." It is true. Google tends to look at sources that they trust to look for words and phrases and structured information that matches up many, many times over across many trusted sites, and then they will show results that match what are in those trusted sites more often. So for example, many folks point out, "What about in political spheres where there might be arguments about which one is correct?" Google will tend to prefer the more accurate one from a scientific consensus-type of basis or from trusted resources, like an NPR or a Wikipedia or a census.gov or those kinds of things. Not necessarily from those domains, but information that matches what is on those domains. If your census numbers don't match what's on the actual census.gov, Google might start to trust you a little less.

6. Entice the clicks by using Google's maximum snippet length to your advantage.

This is less about how to rank there, but more about how to earn traffic from it. If you're ranking in position zero, you might be frustrated that Google is going to take those clicks away from you because the searcher is going to get the answer before they ever need to click on your site, thus you don't earn the traffic.

We've seen this a little bit, but, in fact, most of the time when we rank number zero, we see that we get more traffic than just ranking number one by itself. You're essentially getting two, because you rank number zero plus whatever normal or organic position you're in. You can entice the click by using Google's maximum snippet length to your advantage. Meaning, they are not going to put all the different numbered answers in the lists here from wikiHow, they're only going to put the first four or five. Therefore, if you have a list that is six or seven or eight items long, someone has to click to see them all. Same thing with the paragraph. They're only going to use a certain number of characters, and so if you have a paragraph that leads into the next paragraph or that goes long with the character count or the word count, you can again draw that click rather than having Google take that traffic away.

With this information at your disposal, you should be armed and ready to take over some of those result number zeros, get some answer boxes, some featured snippets on your side. I look forward to hearing your questions. I would love to hear if you've got some examples of featured snippets, where you're ranking, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

My least favorite is this one: http://i.imgur.com/rwsm8CN.jpgNot only its wrong, it also contradicts itself. A highly specific search phrase that consists of 3 words? What, like "apple air pods"? Or "buy an iphone 7"?

Honestly, initially, I even didn't know that our website's article has been featured on "Featured snippet" :D. I came through a lot of articles on this topic so started searching on Google for different queries from our website articles. Finally, I found one of our article is ranking at No.0 position and that moment was epic.

Though there is no perfect protocol to be followed to get ranked at No.0, but your points are very valid points and need to apply while writing contents. Choose topics which are unique and write it constructively with proper headings and bullet points. I think this will help, definitely!

My colleague and I identified an opportunity for a client to rank in a Google answer box. It was a long tail question-based query "what are..." related to a term for which they already had authority.

We optimized their highest ranking blog for the term and added a section at the top of the blog headlined with that long tail term in an H2 (typically their in-blog headlines are H3s) that aimed to answer the "what are..." query as succinctly and accurately as possible. After about 2 months, the long-tail query had triggered the answer box, and about a month later the higher search volume term was generating one as well. We were, of course, ecstatic as the main term is highly relevant to the client's industry.

Unfortunately, after a few weeks, Google stopped generating the answer box for the both the long tail term and the higher search volume term. Do you have any idea why Google would "take away" an answer box once it had triggered one?

Hey Daniel. We had something similar happen to us. I think part of the reason could be due to the backlink profile of the page. We had a blog post that was ranking 2-3 for a medium volume term. This post was seeing good traffic and was slowly picking up backlinks as time went on. As time went by, the post had become outdated. So we decided to create an updated version. All the content was still relevant so we kept that. Images and some numbers were outdated so those are what was updated. Made a few formatting changes and then redirected the old post to the new one. Within about 2 weeks we were awarded with a paragraph featured snippet. This was great! However, after about a month it disappeared. It would come and go for about the next 6 months or so. In this time I was monitoring the posts backlink profile. Links were being gained and lost here and there until we landed a few high authority backlinks. I think this was the nail in the coffin, because it has not left since then. I check daily :).

Hi Daniel. It happen to me also after changed Wordpress theme. I didn't expect to re-featured on answer box because of this changes however, I make add H2 heading format, add quote on the post and it re-appear until I wrote this it still there. But really I cannot replicate this on other post on the same website.

Hmm now I have a question, is the answer box only 1 for 1 website or can be many for 1 website as long as fulfil Google requirement?

2. Here's a tip - if you run any type of site where people search for "{keyword} {year} dates" - that's a great opportunity.

For example, I work on a site that sells Oktoberfest Munich packages, people search in droves every year for Oktoberfest 2017 dates for example. There was already a featured snippet from another site, so I essentially replicated their model with our own spin on it, made it a bit more user friendly, and voila we had the snippet in a matter of weeks.

I know it won't always happen, but for those out there doubting - yes it's possible. Listicles everywhere on everything now!

I followed your tips on one of our posts. We did a lot of spying on the competition's answer boxes - mostly lists. We basically rewrote the text and republished it last Friday.

On Saturday, I was already able to see our answer boxes, but I still didn't expect how big of a change that was going to be. I am just checking our GA. The traffic took off over the weekend - it more than doubled. The post ranks 3 - 8 for most queries.

Google has also been referring to answerboxes for around a decade as One Box results; they've been filled with information from various different Vertical search results from different repositories, such as local search or news results or image results. The difference between those and featured snippets is that featured snippets provide results from a set of answers to natural language questions from high authority pages. A patent was granted to Google this week that discusses those in more detail - Natural language search results for intent queries. I think there are some helpful ideas that look at some of the intent that Google has in showing those in the patent, as we can see in the abstract from the patent, which describes them well:

Systems and methods provide natural language search results to clear-intent queries. To provide the natural language search results, a system may parse a document from an authoritative source to generate at least one heading-text pair, the text appearing under the heading in the document. The system may assign a topic and a question category to the heading-text pair and store the heading-text pair in a data store keyed by the topic and the question category. The system determines that a query corresponds to the topic and the question category, and provides the heading-text pair as a natural language search result for the query. In some implementations, the text portion of the heading-text pair may be a paragraph or a list of items and the natural language search result may be provided with conventional snippet-based search results in response to the query.

As you say, the key to getting featured snippets is making web pages which are incredible resources, answer all user intent and are more in-depth and better laid out than competitor pages.

2. Voice search

Maybe this kind of practice could be essential to doing well in voice search/spoken answers which is on the rise? Any thoughts on that?

3. Page Speed

Page speed must/may be a factor in this? Surly pages which load quicker will have a better chance of getting into position zero?

4. Analysing potential return

The advice I would give to anyone embarking on the journey to position zero would be to analyse what potential return you could get by ranking there depending on the search term, potential search volume, and how much would need to be done to get there (time + design, dev and content costs).

I would bear in mind that a lot of the instant answers appear for search terms which don't have buyer intent e.g. "what's the fastest car in the world" could be a college student messing around.

That said, comparisons could be an area this works well in the future. For example, "Compare Audi Q5 with and BMW X5" could serve a comparison table in future SERPs if the content on a particular page was set up to do so (currently, there is no instant answer for that query).

As you point out, 15% of all queries on Google render instant answers (desktop), and this number will only grow.

5. Topics to target

If you do want to attempt ranking in position zero, I'd advise targeting a topic which you already rank well/fairly well for i.e. on page one/two.

6. Google says nay

Google's wording deters optimisation for instant answers (source). But they would do wouldn't they ;)

"How can I mark my page as a featured snippet?

You can't. Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user's question, and displays the result as a featured snippet."

"Featured snippets don't take structured data into account at all right now"

From this wording, it looks like structured data for instant answers may be something which we can add and benefit from in the future, but it's not possible "right now".

8. Spammable?

Instant answers can be spammed (for good or bad) by competitors and in theory knocked down/boosted by submitting feedback on whether the instant answer is useful or not (see the link on the bottom right of instant answers in the SERPs). This is not something I would do as it's not white hat, but worth bearing in mind that search engine users (or competitors) can report these things which may impact how long you stay in position zero.

That said, I'm sure Google will discount any feedback which appears to be spam (multiple submissions from one IP address, etc.)?

On point #7, I would argue that today, sites using structured data/Schema appear to be much more prevalent in "position zero" from my unscientific observations. While the post you linked from Search Engine Roundtable contradicts that thought process, that post was published over 10 months ago now.

Google's own verbiage on featured snippets states that "Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user's question, and displays the result as a featured snippet."

Given the enhanced ability that structured data gives a Googlebot to quickly extract information from a page, it would seem logical that structured data would also improve a page's likelihood to be listed as a featured snippet.

Interesting Andrew. I agree, it makes perfect sense and I've seen nothing to contradict what you say above. I was only going from what I read on Search Engine Roundtable, but like you say, it was published 10 months ago and a lot may have changed in that time.

Yes, I think that the strongest weapon to appear on Google's Answer Boxes are to know the market and what are their concerns and motivations; and above all knowing how to use those answers that do not have or has not known better give our competitors

Just this morning I was sifting through my Moz Pro account. Looking at my rankings and using the new "serp features" feature, I can see what keywords of mine have any type of existing featured snippet in the serps. I then can compare that to where we rank, choose the terms of ours that are ranking on page one, and then try to better format those pages to try and jump into the featured snippet.

The folks at BuiltVisible did a nice job testing out a lot of markup changes to give a better chance of showing up (and showing up the way you want) in the answer box: https://builtvisible.com/answer-boxes/

No doubt again you cover a good topic in this whiteboard Friday. I never think about it before. Thanks for aware with Answer Box and its benefits. It would be really great help for us. Thanks and keep it up.

So if I were to optimize a few pages in an attempt to gain position 0 (from number....9 let's say), how long should I expect to wait post-optimization before we see movement? Asking because we've optimized a few for this exact purpose a few days ago, and still nothing. Wondering if I need to go improve or tweak more, or if I'm just being really impatient.

Hi, great post as always Rand, thank you! Was wondering about featured snippets by content type - that is, is it always an article? Have you seen paginated content receive a FS? We have some paginated content that also contains a "view-all" javascript function - Could a FS get pulled from there?

I don't have a site yet so I can't answer your question, but I wanted to leave this comment to thank you so very much for including a transcript. It is so important for my retention of info that I'm trying to learn-especially tech stuff which I have a real problem with-and hardly anyone seems to see its' necessity and importance. I frequently ask for transcripts and rarely get them, so not having to ask is a huge deal.

one of my blog post is featured in Google answer box if you type "how to fix no logon servers available" in the search, but i don't know how this happened and how to repeat this for another post, i will re-read your posting to fully understand and i hope i can repeat my 'success'.

Although answer snippets seem nice to look at, but they really don't serve any purpose except for the very basic queries. Most search queries these days require a little more reading and I have personally never used these. My bet is that this feature is in test mode and will go away in the long run. It is probably not a good thing to utilise your (scarce) resources on trying to rank for these.

Whiteboard Fridays are amazing - Thank you, Rand! Im wondering if there is a reverse lookup or some tool that will allow us to search and see if we currently are showing up at position 0 / in an answer box?

As always, you've provided some great insight into a somewhat complex topic. I completely agree with all of the mentioned factors and am very thankful for you and the rest of the Moz team for developing tools that can assist with the research needed to find these kinds of opportunities!

Just one question though, have you or Dr.Pete noticed any topics or areas of focus that get featured in these kinds of results? I'd love to get your feedback! Thanks!

If you check out Rob Bucci's presentation that I linked to in the post above, you'll see that he categorized keywords into various sectors like finance and e-commerce and then noted the relative volumes of answer boxes. His advice is important, though. Don't rely on broad patterns - check your own keyword universe and get a tool that shows you all the places where different types of SERP features appear.

Awesome research and findings! We found one of our clients competitors in the paragraph rankings a couple of weeks ago and have started testing restructuring of the content to better match the query-format. I really loved this whiteboard session since it confirm that we are on the right track, and will keep hunting that twilight zone position :-)

People are searching for instant answers on my point of view and experience before you get the top 0 your content needs to establish authority. it needs to be informative and full of facts.

Since most of the content that would appear on top 0 are the verified answers that people are searching. And I believe rank brain has something to do with it(correct me if I am wrong) since it's feeding information so if it concludes that it's the right answer then it should be placed on top.

This should also shove down duplicate content that are just revised or rewritten and also hoax or fake content

One trap I utilize is to have an outline answer over the fold. At that point whatever is left of the online journal really expounds. I even go so far as to begin the passage with "In rundown:" and Google takes the clue.In some cases I utilize more than one synopsis with the inquiries being the H2 subheadings. Continuously with that same word check section answer that is by all accounts favored.A large portion of our zeros are passage position, so they concur with the discoveries you display. The rest are records. I can't think about any tables that we have scored with.

Utilize Cyrus' tips about the Search Console: My Single Best SEO Tip for Improved Web Traffic This is potentially one of the best SEO writes ever!Serves to truly concentrate on the watchwords that Google is utilizing. Conforming your title, H1 and H2s utilizing the inquiry console data is one of the best tips ever.

If you search for "What are UTM codes" my post from 4 years ago is in the answer box and in the number 1 position. It has been in this spot for quite some time and I believe my old agency gets good traffic from it. I took the angle of a question back then because we had several clients that were interested in tracking parameters to try and track offline campaigns and this is the content I was able to come up with. It still holds true today in many ways.

I have a question and that is - If we want to rank for a certain query at the zero position in SERP showing some content in the table format. Does the position of table also matters where it's placed on webpage? Do table at the starting point have higher chances of ranking then tables in the middle or bottom of content on our blog post?

Google has already improved its search relevancy, within its search results that provide direct answers. All the algorithms are coming to build a knowledge database that people can access easily over search engines. As per I think all the credit goes to content just because content will define the value. If you know about how to connect with a targeted audience with targeted keyword with the right information then you might be listed on 0 position. As long as you can do that consistently, Google will list you for that position. Google is passionate about user relevancy.